What I’m teaching this week

S  P  R  E  A  D. We started our first two classes wondering about what it means for a number to represent the central tendency of a set. Now we will explore ways to see why those kinds of numbers can’t be trusted. I have a group work task that I did last year which I could roll out early next week. The idea of outliers has been easy for kids to understand, and we talked about it briefly before break. so I will do a little review with that tomorrow. Then work through a parallel exploration of standard deviation and the IQR before a reflection on Thursday.

What I’m blogging this week

This is the first Monday of #MTBoS30, and with that I am going to bring back my Monday “This Week” posts. These posts provide a brief synopsis of what I’m teaching, blogging, and thinking this week. I also have a number of posts ideas lined up that will help me keep from hitting writers block this week and through out this month. This week I plan to get in to some of the things I’ve learned from NCTM conferences in San Francisco and Minnesota. I also want to talk do some class logs from the classes I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and also write up the project that I taught last cycle.

What I’m thinking this week

This week I have so much stuff to do, I’m basically just seeing if I can survive and be productive. NYC schools just returned from break. All the teachers, and some of the kids returned today, but it feels like my brain is still out on vacation. Over the break I watched the most entertaining TED talk I’ve seen in some time and now I keep thiking about it. In Tim Urban’s talk “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator” he describes exactly what has been going on in my brain since mid-April. Hopefully my rational decision-maker will keep the monkey off the wheel, before I get behind and end up dealing with the panic monster! Definitely watch the video if you have time (and aren’t procrastinating).

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